Now here's the question: Is that all that's going on? Is it not possible that, in five,
ten or twenty years we'll realize that the action that mattered in the early
twenty-teens was happening in the rest of the ocean, and not just among the mollusks
with the biggest tentacles?

War stories are always interesting, and very easy to tell because the format is
formulaic. Remember Linux vs. Microsoft, personalized as Linus vs.
Bill? Never mind
that Linux as a server OS worked from the start with countless millions (or even
billions) of Windows clients. Or that both Linus and Bill had other fish to fry from
the start. But personalization is cheap and easy, and there was enough antipathy on
both sides to stoke the story-telling fires, so that's what we got. Thus, today we might
regard Linux as a winner and Microsoft as a loser (or at least trending in that
direction). The facts behind (or ignored by) the stories mostly say that both entities
have succeeded or failed largely on their own merits.

Here's a story that illustrates how stories can both lead and mislead.

At the time, I was working with Sun Microsystems and its allies on SPARC, Sun's RISC
design, which was implemented in various ways by a raft of chip makers, including Texas
Instruments, Fujitsu and Cypress Semiconductor. In spite of Sun's heft in the
marketplace, we had trouble getting attention for SPARC with the tech pubs, because
they tended to see everything as an Intel vs. Motorola fight. We felt we couldn't
challenge either one of those guys head-on, even if SPARC was superior on technical
grounds (which Sun and its partners believed). So we decided the best strategy was for
SPARC to pick a fight with another RISC upstart called MIPS.

This was pure bait for the pubs, which came over to this new fight to see what was up.
I think we caught MIPS off guard at first, but it defended itself well and ended
up selling years later for hundreds of $millions to SGI, which eventually went
bankrupt. SPARC is still around, running gear made by Oracle, which acquired Sun. The
big winner in the CPU market remained Intel and, therefore, CISC. In fact, the x86
architecture still rules, at least on PCs and servers, but not in mobile devices, where
ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) now kicks butt. And for what it's worth, MIPS is now
fighting ARM in the Android market, and Motorola's chip division is the
long-since-spun-off ON Semiconductor.

The real story is always much more complicated than vendor war coverage can
characterize.

"Winners" never win forever, especially in tech.

"Losers" don't always die. Often they stay alive by selling out, or they thrive by
finding niches and working them.

Now back to our four squid.

The graphic above The Economist story is a antique-style map
(http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/cf_images/images-magazine/2012/12/01/FB/20121201_FBD000.png) of the fantasy-fiction
kind, drawn by David Parkins (http://www.davidparkins.com). It shows a large mountainous land, with the Sea of
Content to the west and the Sea of Commerce to the east. Dividing the land are four
throne-doms: Applechia, Google Earth, Amazonia and Fortress Facebook. A fifth, Empire
of the Microserfs, is across the Sea of Content in the northwest corner of the map,
bordered by the Cliffs of Surface. In Google Earth are Adsense-land, the Mirkwood of
Regulation, the Wastes of Litigation ("Here be lawyers"), Pagerank Pinnacle (at the end
of Algorithm Reach), beside which lies The Firth of Android. Appleacia has the iPhone
Keep. Amazon has the Cloud Mountains and a volcano named Kindle. Between the latter and
Netflix Nation (which lies above the Satrapy of Spotify) intrudes Pirate Bay. Offshore
are the eBook Islands. On the opposite shore are OneClick Castle and Prime Port.
Somewhere in the middle, between the Cloud Mountains and Fortress Facebook is the Lost
City of MySpace. Out in the Sea of Content are small islands called RIM Rocks and
Nokia. Atop the map is The Dark Offline. Floating in the Sea of Commerce is a Chinese
junk flying the Samsung banner. A peninsula in the southeast corner features Secondhand
City, the Bay of E and the Cape of Coin. There's a dragon smiling out of the Sea of
Commerce, named The Next Big Thing. Finally, in the center of the map, between the four
thronedoms, is an un-named body of water surrounding Identity Island.

Parkins' antique style also depicts antique substance in the making—because all
four of the thrones (or squid, take your pick) are at least as affected by their own
weaknesses as by the strengths of companies they are said to be fighting. And, because
so many of us are at their mercy, their weaknesses are to some degree ours as well.

So let's look at those weaknesses, and then at where the rest of the action is, because
neither are getting enough attention.

Comments

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One can only wish the author will be proved right in his conclusion, but I am afraid the future will be much darker. At least where I live, being hooked up to 'the net' is already practically mandatory. We may very soon become literal serfs under constant and total surveillance and control. There is probably no escape possible - not even through legislation.

The pattern of the struggle was set at the birth of computing: Will we use the power of computing to replace the human experience --Artificial Intelligence-- or to personalize and *augment* the human experience? AI is the corporate squid model. Augmentation is the personal model.

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